Spirit Gate: Book One of Crossroads (35 page)

Among the rocks lay scattered remains, skulls and leg bones and scraps of cloth visible. A dark shape moved within a shadowed crevice, difficult to make out from this height. They circled low. The remains spread beyond the outcrop into mixed grass and scrub woodland. Where a stream wound along somewhat upslope, another dense scatter of remains lay strewn along the bank.

It was a battlefield, easy to read: the first engagement had taken place where the stream afforded cover, and then the losing side had retreated in a straggle through heavy growth to the greater defensive position offered by the rocks. It was by no means clear who had won, and who had lost. Wind, rain, and animals at work among the dead had taken their toll of the evidence.

As had human agency: Four figures picked their way along the stream’s bank, overturning skulls, using a spade to pry loose rib cages overgrown by grass. They were so intent on their task that they didn’t notice the eagles passing overhead.

Peddo stayed aloft. Joss sent Scar down. The eagle fanned his tail and threw his legs forward. They thumped home. Trouble came down right beside him, and both reeves were out of their harness and scrambling as the children—for they were children—gawped up at them with their scavenger’s tools hanging forgotten in grubby hands.

The eldest among them, a girl, began to cry without audible weeping, just a smudging trickle on dirty cheeks. She was that scared. The littlest was a scrap of a thing, and it took off only to be grabbed by the Snake and slung roughly back to stand with the other three. There it cowered, hiding its left arm behind its back. Looking them over, Joss saw that one of the middle children was lacking an ear and the other had a twisted hand broken somehow and healed all wrong. The younger two had swollen bellies, and all four had various sores on crusted lips, swollen red-rimmed eyes, flies buzzing around pus-ridden blisters on their bare arms and legs, and besides all that an unhealthy stink in addition to the obvious stink of children who haven’t been taken to the baths in months.

They stood in the midst of tumbled remains, which were scoured until nothing but bone and scraps of decaying cloth was left. He was surprised that none of the Lady’s wandering mendicants had gathered the bones and burned them in order to properly complete the rites to placate the restless dead.

“What you going to do, ver?” asked the eldest. She had a squint that made her look defiant, but in fact it came from a cut at one eye that had scarred and pulled her lid tight. Like the others, she was as thin as if she’d been constructed out of sticks, with a hollow face and deep-set eyes.

“I’m Reeve Joss,” he said gently. “What are your names?”

She looked at him as if he were crazy, and did not answer.

He tried again. “Where is your family? Kinfolk? Parents?” But he knew what the answer would be before he heard it.

She shrugged. “Gone,” she said as her hand dropped down to brush the shoulder of the earless one. With her good hand, Broken Hand took hold of the elbow of Littlest.

“How came that about?”

She shrugged.

“What of other kin? Aunties and uncles? Anyone to take you in?”

She shrugged. The others stood stock-still with well-practiced silence. They had been alone long enough that they knew the routine.

“The temples take in such as these little criminals,” said the Snake.

“We’re not going there!” she said fiercely. “They just make slaves of us, and split us apart. City folk are that way, willing to make slaves of themselves, that’s what my dad says. But our people don’t do that. We’re doing okay. We’re doing good enough.”

The Snake chuffed a laugh. “Doesn’t look that way to me.”

“What are you doing out here?” Joss asked before he lost her, for he knew how some clammed right up when faced with scorn.

She indicated the rib cage she’d been trying to pry up. “There was a battle here, oh I don’t know, a year or two ago so they say.”

“White Lion year,” chirped Broken Hand. “During the Flower Rains.”

“That’s right,” said Eldest. “We got rights just like anyone to come see what we may find, ver.”

“Looters!” said the Snake with his habitual sneer. “Grave robbers.”

“Shut it!” snapped Joss. He looked back at the girl, who appraised this exchange with a raised eyebrow and a nudge of the foot to Earless. “Looks like this field is well scavenged already. As it would be, since it’s coming on three years since the battle happened. What are you finding?”

“You going to try to take it from us, ver?” she asked, not with any sort of challenge.

“If I was, I wouldn’t say so at first, would I?”

He thought to crack a smile from her, but she just looked at him and considered what he had said with the flat stare of a child who has long since hunkered down to the serious business of survival and is doubtful she will make it. She might have gotten on better without the littler ones, but people often made that choice because they could make no other. Sometimes they even made it because it was the just thing to do.

“You’re reeves,” she said.

“So we are, as I said.”

“Those reeves out of Horn Hall, they don’t come around no more. You from Horn Hall?”

“We’re not.”

“Didn’t think so.” She shrugged again, as though ridding herself of a weight. “We none of us know why—that they stopped coming round, I mean. It just is that way now, and were that way from before.”

“From before what?”

“Before we come to Horn.”

“Where did you come from?”

The Snake moved off upwind, wrinkling his nose against the stink, but Joss held his position despite the strength of their sickly sweet-sour smell.

She looked away from him, blinking rapidly. “Dunesk Valley, up in the Ossu. We come from there. Can’t live there now.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged.

“Where do you live now?”

“Horn. At least, the folk mostly leave us alone if we bide in the alleys and bother no one. If we find something or other, maybe we can sell it.”

“Found a ring,” piped Littlest proudly. “I did!”

“Hush,” said Broken Hand, pinching Littlest’s skin until it whimpered.

“That was last month,” said Eldest hastily. “Lest you’re thinking it was just now.”

Which, by the nervous set of their chins and the way her gaze flicked toward Earless, made him understand that in fact they had found something
just now.
In fact, they believed that two reeves might likely steal what they had. That’s what they thought of reeves. It made him want to shout in frustration.

“You need to tell me what happened in Dunesk Valley,” he said instead, because understanding a thing was often the only way to solve it. “I need to know, because I’m a reeve. You know it’s our job to set things right.”

“That’s what we used to think, but them at Horn Hall just stopped coming.”

“When was that?”

For a long while she was silent. Earless let go her hand and edged a few steps away, crouched down at the bank, and ladled some water into his mouth. The Snake had backed up and was staring toward the distant boulders. Peddo was nowhere in sight.

Then she started talking in a voice as flat as her gaze, as if all emotion had long since been crushed out of her. “Dunesk’s about a day’s walk, by the trail, and one time we come down to Horn a few years back—”

“Snake year it was,” said Broken Hand.

“—that’s right, just after that one made his second year.” She pointed to the littlest.

“Four years ago,” Joss said.

She nodded. “We came down because Dad and Uncle had hides to trade. But then the raiders came. There was all kinds of things they were doing, so our dad he sent us into town because it isn’t safe up there no more. We sleep on the street. Mostly folk leave us alone, not always.”

That
not always
made him wince. She was old enough, if a man had a fancy for veal, which he did not, and anyway any child was old enough for those who had a taste for that manner of cruelty.

He asked, “What of your dad? Or your uncle? Are they still living?”

She choked. “I hope so.”

“It sounds awful, living in Horn as you do. You ever thought of going back home?”

She would not meet his eye. “Awful is what they do in the villages, if they catch you.”

“What do they do?”

She shuddered and would not speak, and when finally he offered some dry flat-bread out of his pouch, she pointed at Littlest, who lifted his left arm out from behind his back to display a scarred and seamed stump. For a moment Joss couldn’t figure why he was doing it.

Volias said, with real revulsion, “Lady’s Tit! They cut off the little wight’s hand!”

Earless scrambled back from the stream’s edge, and Eldest broke the bread into four pieces. They inhaled it, so it seemed, because it vanished in a blink.

“Look there!” said Volias, pointing to a spot behind Joss’s back.

On occasion Joss found himself confused by the way the ground changed when you were standing on it as opposed to when you were flying above it. Angles of sight shifted; blind in one place, you found you could see in the other; unexpected vistas revealed themselves because of the curve and elevation of the ground or when mist hid from the sky what, with feet on the earth, you could see perfectly well.

The woodland scrub had seemed, from the air, to separate the rocky ground from the stream, but in fact the land sloped down into a hollow where the densest growth took advantage of damper ground to flourish, and rose again to the stony ground. Seen from the ground, the rock formations were taller than they had seemed from the air, with a hundred hiding places and defensive posts. Seemingly oblivious of the reeves, their eagles, and the four children, a person bent, rose, walked the ground, bent and rose again. The figure was dressed in some manner of loose, black robe. From this distance, Joss thought it must be a woman, but he couldn’t be sure.

“That’s another like us,” said Eldest, seeing how they were looking that way.

“You’ve seen that person before?”

“Yes, ver. So we have.”

“She’s a scavenger, like you?”

“So she must be, ver. We come out here all the time. We saw her first time a few month back—”

“It was Fox Month,” said Broken Hand. “It was so cold at night, beginning of Shiver Sky. That’s the first time we saw her out here.”

“That’s right,” said Eldest. “We see her now and again. Not all the time.”

“You ever talk to her? Have any trouble with her?”

“Nah, she don’t talk, except one time she stopped us and asked us if we saw any strange thing that had an outland look to it. She’s looking for some dead person, maybe her lover or her son. I don’t know and wasn’t thinking to ask.”

“Someone she got to missing,” said Earless abruptly in the hoarse voice of a boy about to break into manhood. “Someone she want desperately to find.”

“How often do you come here?” Joss asked.

“As often as we need to,” said Eldest, who was relaxing a little. “Gleaning is all we got, you see. No law against it!” she added hastily, looking at the Snake, but he had a
frown on his ugly mug and wasn’t looking at the children at all. He was tracking the movements of that other person up among the rocks.

“Then you sell what you’ve found.”

She shrugged. “We pretty much found everything I expect there is to be found. Sometimes a hand got cut off and rolled into a crevice. That’s how—” She almost said a name, but bit her tongue. “That’s how that one found the ring.” She nodded toward Littlest.

“Those dark holes could have snakes and biting things in them,” said Joss uneasily.

She rolled her eyes and said nothing. Snakes and biting things, obviously, did not concern her much compared with her other troubles.

“What’ll you kids do now?” he asked.

“What you think?” she demanded. “We told you all. Can we go now?”

They were skittish, and Littlest kept wiping away the green snot leaking from his nose.

“Have you nowhere else to go?” asked Volias suddenly.

“You ain’t been listening,” said Eldest. “Or you would have heard. You going to take us somewhere on those eagles? And then who will take us in? We got to wait here by Horn until Dad come to get us. That’s what he said. When it was safe again. That’s what he said.”

Joss shook his head. “You go on. You’ve got a long walk back to Horn.”

They lit out as if fire had been kindled beneath them.

Volias settled onto his haunches beside the rib cage, studying it without touching. “Is that it?” he demanded, glaring at Joss. “They cut off that kid’s hand!”

“What else can we do for them?”

“That’s why we keep running from fights? Because we can’t do anything else for them? What about those two dead men at that farm? Seems we reeves do a lot of looking, and a lot of squeezing available women, but we don’t do any fighting anymore.”

“You’re right,” said Joss.

The words took the Snake so off guard that he rocked back, lost his balance, and sat, kicking out reflexively. His foot jostled the rib cage, ripping it half out of the covering of debris that had begun to bury it. The mat of debris beneath it included decaying hempen cloth dyed a clay-red color that the Snake shied away from touching.

“This must be some manner of outlander,” said the Snake. “Wearing death cloth like regular clothes. Look here. His belt’s still in good shape.” He peeled the strip of leather out of the soil, whipping it away from the rib cage. A heavier object went flying to land on the nearby grass with a thud.

“Best we go talk to that woman,” said Joss.

“Why for, if we mean to do nothing about any of it?”

“Listen,
Volias.
The rot’s set in deep. We can get ourselves killed, or we can find the source of the rot and kill it. I don’t see any other way. But of ourselves, just us three, out here where we’ve no allies apparently and no idea who is our enemy and who regards us as enemy, what are we three to do? Or did you want to take on two cadres of armed men?”

The Snake ignored him, most likely because there was no answer. Joss trudged down into the hollow, pushing through brush, noting the way the battle had whirled
and eddied into clumps of fighting, marked by collections of disturbed bones, and then streamed out again over open ground as one group fled toward the rocks while the other group, presumably, pursued. Why in the hells had a group of outlanders ridden into the Hundred? Who would have hired them? The other reeves ought to have passed along to Clan Hall news of such an unusual occurrence, but they hadn’t. Clan Hall had never heard about any battle fought in the Year of the White Lion near the city of Horn.